The following week turned out to be busier than expected. On Monday, Travis was involved in finalising the proposal with the rest of the team. They emailed the final document to Gear Up late afternoon, and then Travis was busy carrying out a change request in another project.
On the evening of Monday itself, they got a call from the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Gear Up. They had liked the proposal and were interested in understanding more, and had requested to see a demo of the new features in action, in the event Re-Solved were able to arrange one. Accordingly, a demonstration was arranged to be conducted at Gear Up's offices on Thursday. So, Travis was busy till Wednesday with the rest of the team members, preparing the presentation and getting the demo system ready for the few scenarios which they had identified as relevant for Gear Up. On Wednesday evening, they did an end to end testing of the use cases on the demo system and adjusted the configuration and master data wherever necessary.
Finally, Thursday, the day of presentation dawned. The office was located adjoining Gear Up's plant outside the city. So, Jim and the team reached Gear Up's office half an hour earlier, so that they could not get delayed by the morning rush hour traffic. The presentation and the accompanying demonstration went smoothly .
Gear Up liked what they saw. They thanked Jim and his team for arranging such an excellent demonstration in such a short period of time and requested whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting tomorrow to discuss the way forward. Jim requesting some time to check availability of all the team members, did a quick internal meeting with his team to ascertain the people who would need to be present from Re-Solved, in addition to those who were involved in the demo. Once he was sure that all the required team members were available, he conveyed the availability of his team to the CTO.
On Friday, the Re-Solved team again went to Gear Up's office, this time to discuss the project start date. During the discussion, they came to know that Gear Up was planning to acquire new hobbing and grinding machines and were already in the process of retro-fitting some of their older machines in order to have a greater level of automation. These activities were expected to be completed by mid January next year. In case the implementation was started this month, the end users would not get enough time to test the system thoroughly.
So it was decided to start the implementation after the new machines were installed. Jim proposed the idea of utilising these months in having the UX team finalise the prototypes for the new functionality they would be adding to the system. The end users would need to spend an hour or two with Re-Solve's UX team for the design of the interface. This would mean that by the time the work on the machines was done, they would have finalised the user interface, so that development could start right away. This idea also appealed to the Gear Up team, as the delay imposed by the machine upgrades would not be completely wasted. Accordingly, it was decided to finalise a schedule the UX team's sessions with the end users by end of next week.
Jim was happy that all had gone as per plan, and as a gesture of his appreciation, he took the entire team out to dinner that night. So, finally, of Friday night, on the bus ride home after dinner, did Travis get a chance to think about NaNoWriMo.
"I should at least come up with a basic plot, as there is only a week left.", ran his thoughts.
He now began to think of what should be the plot of his story. Should it be set in the present, or should it be in the future? And how much of the real world should carry into the world of his story?
He reasoned that it a futuristic setting would be best, as he would be more free to shape the world as it suited him. Continuing to think along the lines of setting up the story world, he thought a post apocalyptic setting would serve the purpose better.
But then again that meant that some apocalypse had to occur. Examples of this, he realised, were to be found in abundance in existence of sci-fi stories. The most common (and the only one Travis was able to think of, as he got off the bus) among these was a world war, which destroyed all the major countries, leaving the survivors wandering around in ruins of cities surrounded by nuclear wastelands. He felt that something along similar lines would serve his purpose. As far as the mystery was concerned, he thought as he unlocked the door, it would be worth examining whether he could use the "secret organisation threatening to destroy the world" formula.
It was late in the evening the next day when Travis again turned his attention to NaNoWriMo. The day being Saturday, and so Travis had spent his day in a more leisurely fashion (Monday's proposal and the ensuing activities had meant that he had slept less throughout the week).
He had planned to write a brief summary of his story today. As per his initial plan, this was to be done by next Friday. If he came up with a plot idea this weekend, he could fine-tune it over the next few days so that he could upload it to the NaNoWriMo website next weekend.
He thought about the futuristic technology should be at the centre of the story. If it was to be convincing, it had to be something he had sufficient knowledge about. More thinking along this theme led him to electricity generation and distribution (Travis was an electrical engineer by education). He was confident that he could come up with a futuristic electricity distribution system, such as an artificial intelligence coordinating the different power plants in the grid to ensure continuous power.
Which brought him to the need for such a system to exist in his story. He initially thought to use the idea of the energy being generated on another planet (in another universe, maybe) and being harnessed on earth to create electricity. But the concept felt somewhat contrived to him. He decided to go with something more simple instead. In his story, the need for the futuristic electricity distribution system would arise from the energy crisis.
Now he had to decide upon the main characters. After some thought, he decided to create a preliminary description of the protagonist and antagonist of the story. The hero, he decided, probably would be an engineer working on implementing this new technology in a city. The villain would be some shady government official. It was then that he had an idea.
The villain needed to be someone who was against the electricity distribution system. Who better than the head of some power generation company (or a group of companies), whose business is threatened by this new system? Yes, that would make a good villain. As regards to whether the government or any other organisations would be supporting the villain, Travis decided to worry about when he started actually writing the story.
Collecting his thoughts, he opened his notebook and started writing the initial draft.
In the near future, the world is grappling from a severe energy crisis. A new method of electricity generation and distribution looks promising enough to reduce the problem.
But a power generation company seems hell bent on destroying this hope. Will they succeed?
Travis read what he had written a few times, turning it over in his mind. He found, much to his disappointment, that he did not like what he had written. For one, it seemed to be too generic. And it seemed to convey, rather erroneously, that the evil corporation was the protagonist.
It would be much better to flesh the back story a little, he thought. And make it a little more mysterious, if possible. Also, the hero and villain needed to be clearly identifiable. So he wrote it again.
In the near future, the world is grappling from a severe energy crisis. The existing resources are already depleted or on the verge of exhaustion. Only a fraction of the power plants remain operational. Darkness seems imminent.
But all hope is not lost. Energised Inc., a recent entrant in the power generation business, claims to have found a solution. They expect that they will be able to put an end to the shortage of energy.
But there are some that do not seem to share Energised Inc.'s vision. These people will do everything in their power to stop Energised Inc. from bringing the new system online.
In these times of need, who will rise up and stop them?
This was better than before, Travis thought. He decided now to focus on the other task, that of deciding the title.
Now what should the title be? Surely it should describe the events taking place in the story world in some way. If it were unrelated to the story, the readers might have different expectations about what the story is actually about, which would ruin the experience.
Travis was still thinking about it when his eye fell on the day's newspaper, which was lying on the table beside the couch. He thought about giving it a quick glance, just in case there was something in there to provide inspiration.
It was not that Travis liked reading newspapers. On the contrary, he hated them. At times, it would seem to him like it was the news that was competing for a place between the advertisements, rather than the other way round. Occasionally, he would buy the Saturday and/or Sunday paper so that he could enjoy the comic strips and crosswords and other puzzles which (thankfully) were still present in the weekend editions. He would buy the newspaper from the newsstand near his home when he went for his morning stroll.
Travis started at the front page. There were the usual headlines about recent happenings, which included the perennial political blame game, a feature article on climate change due to global warming, and why this year winter might be one of the coldest ever. It was a pretty well-researched and well-written article, and made for an interesting read. Travis briefly glanced through it, and thinking it might be useful while describing the post-apocalyptic world in his story, jotted a quick summary of it in his notebook.
The next pages were filed with local news, which did not give him what he was searching for. Then, there was the national news, followed by international news. These also did not give him the inspiration he hoped to find. It was finally in the sports section that he found what he was looking for.
It was a moderately sized article describing a roundup of one of a recently concluded local sporting event. The article briefly listed the different sports that were part of the event and then went on to highlight key players who had made short work of their opposition. One of these accounts mentioned the victor as resorting to "excellently timed plays to wrest the power from the opponent and turn the game around".
Of course! 'Power Play' would make such an apt title for his story. It perfectly described the conflict that was to be portrayed in the novel. The fact that the title was also a pun (in the context of the novel), was an added bonus.
He decided to use this as the title for the story. In any case, he had about a week before he added his novel on the NaNoWriMo website. So he could easily change the title in case he came up with a better one (which was highly unlikely).
Travis folded the newspaper back to its original form and opened his notebook. He jotted down the title in his notebook. In addition, he had thought of evaluating whether he needed to use any version control software for saving different versions of his story. This, he decided to do tomorrow, and entered it in Sunday's to-do list in the calendar application on his phone.
Closing his notebook, he looked at the clock on the table. It was almost dinner time, and a few minutes later he was busy making dinner plans.
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